Buildings, defined as structures for human habitation or use, are among the largest man made structures (only civil engineering works such as dams and bridges are larger). From the earliest history of construction, building techniques have been constrained by the structural and physical properties of available materials, the technology for shaping, finishing and joining materials together, and the means at hand for transporting, lifting, and putting the pieces of a building together. For thousands of years the essential technical and physical characteristics of buildings (stylistic differences aside) remained the same.
About one hundred and fifty years ago, the Industrial Revolution introduced a radically new building technology—material choices that previously were limited to wood and masonry gave way to materials like steel and glass, hand craft yielded to machine manufacture, and transportation and lifting methods previously limited to wind and animal power were replaced with engines. These changes, among many others, led to a vastly more complex society that demanded larger and more elaborate structures to house new living, work, social, and cultural functions. Rising standards of living, and the growth of the middle class, led to the substitution of modern appliances and electro-mechanical building services for servant labor. The process of change has been so complete that buildings constructed in the last eighty years, not to mention the last forty, would be unrecognizable to an inhabitant of the mid-nineteenth century.
However, despite all of these changes, the construction of buildings today remains rooted at the building site, as it has been for thousands of years. That is, most buildings have been, and are still being built at a building site by building tradesmen who are classified by their trade unions and along the lines of the construction classification system of the Construction Specifications Institute (“CSI”). Typically, an architect along with engineering consultants initially design each building as a stand-alone object with a unique set of construction drawings and specifications which are the result of thousands of hours of work, and which describe in detail the design intention of the architect. Each of the trades involved in building the structure is required to evaluate the unique set of drawings and specifications, and to propose a bid and furnish, if necessary, shop drawings which further specify the method of construction.
Thus, the conventional method of contracting the construction of a large building can involve innumerable subcontractors, with added tiers of sub-subcontractors, most of whom are working together for the first time and who have competing needs for time and space to perform their work. Each subcontractor is responsible for hundreds if not thousands of bits and pieces of work, some of those pieces constructed in the field at the building site, like concrete formwork, and some factory manufactured and installed in the field, like curtain wall. Widely varying dimensional tolerances between factory and field methods lead to excessive allowances for fitting, which in turn encourages sloppy joinery. Three-dimensional coordination of components, such as ductwork and piping, with structural and spatial restrictions, is done in the field under intense schedule pressure, and there is only one opportunity to get it right; frequently a ceiling is lowered or boxed out to accommodate errors, and even less desirable accommodations that sacrifice the quality of design and function are not uncommon. Each design is “one-of-a-kind,” with architects and engineers “re-inventing the wheel” on every new building. Even medium-size buildings can entail hundreds of thousands of man-hours of design and coordination among architects, engineers, consultants, code officials, and clients.
This typical method of building construction, although traditional, does not take full advantage of the principles of industrialization, including the mass production of interchangeable parts and assembly in a controlled factory setting. Historically, the primary reason for this failure has been that most buildings, especially multi-story buildings, are too large to be cost-effectively moved from a factory to the erection site, i.e., the logistics of transportation do not suggest an obvious way of making entire buildings in factories. Another reason is that members of the craft-based construction industry (including the design professions) have not realized anywhere near the full potential of industrial methods and advances in information technology. Finally, the perception that the quality and versatility of “pre-fabricated” buildings is lower than that of manufactured buildings has created a stigma associated with the term “modular” construction.
The conventional “modular” industry (which constitutes the prior art) has not significantly changed the way in which buildings are put together, except that relatively small buildings can be constructed under a factory roof in controlled conditions. Otherwise, a modular building is built in essentially the same sequence as it is in the field, that is, one whole building is put together at a time, and is then broken down into modules and shipped. The conventional “modular” industry operates under the premise that the largest possible load and therefore the fewest total number of trips is the most economical transportation solution. However, generally speaking the high cost of transporting oversize loads has limited the distribution range of conventional modular factories to a five hundred mile radius.
This limit of distribution range has stunted the growth of the conventional modular manufacturing industry and has prevented it from operating on a national, not to mention international, scale. Although a network of distributors arose to answer the need for nationwide distribution, those distributors, who determine the market, do a satisfactory business in temporary facilities such as classrooms and construction site offices, and therefore have no reason to change the status quo. Furthermore, innovation has not come, nor is it likely to come, from the manufacturers, since the roots of the “modular” industry are not in the world of heavy construction, but rather in trucking- and construction-related service businesses, which branched into manufacturing to take advantage of opportunities in the market for temporary facilities. Temporary facilities are the core business (over sixty percent) of the “modular” industry, and in the face of inertia this fact is not likely to lead to change in the way permanent buildings are constructed, especially since such temporary facilities are generally of inferior aesthetic and performance quality as compared to standard building construction.
Thus, the conventional modular manufacturing industry has not succeeded in penetrating the construction market to any significant degree because it has not solved the transportation problem, and because it has not made any fundamental changes in construction technology to adapt buildings to industrialized methods of manufacture. And while, in an alternative approach, the prior art has attempted to re-use conventional ISO cargo containers by converting them, perhaps with portions of their corrugated side walls removed, into habitable structures such as residential housing, these attempts have resulted in structures that rely upon the remaining corrugated walls of these cargo containers as the primary facade. This approach limits the aesthetic expression of a building to the image of a stack of cargo containers, and results in a building envelope that is deficient from the standpoint of weathering and thermal performance. Moreover, this prior art has been limited by its narrow understanding of the conventional ISO cargo container as a closed box that can be fitted out as habitable space merely by the addition of windows, doors, partitions, fixtures, etc., and that can, in some instances, be joined together with other such boxes to yield somewhat larger structures.
Therefore, and in summary, the rationalization of production that began in the late nineteenth century with Henry Ford, and which has advanced to the present day with robotics and “just in time inventory,” has yet to change in a fundamental way the organization of the construction process for multi-story buildings. Clearly, a need exists to extend the concept of industrialization to the construction of buildings, on a par with the automotive, aerospace, and shipbuilding industries, and a solution to the transportation problem is the essence of any successful industrialized building concept. The solution to the transportation problem provided by the present invention, combined with the changes in construction technology provided by the present invention, allow the construction industry to parallel the supply chain and production methods used by the automotive and aerospace industries, and ultimately lead to a re-thinking of the entire construction process, beginning with how buildings are designed. The increased efficiency of international transportation has led to the present invention, which essentially reduces a building to an assemblage of the largest building blocks which can be efficiently transported over great distances.